The image that most readily comes to mind when we think of Queen Victoria is that of an elderly, white-haired woman dressed entirely in black, her white widow’s cap perched solemnly atop her head.
Portrait of Queen Victoria by Bertha Müller after Heinrich von Angeli, 1900. Source: National Portrait Gallery, London.
This enduring portrayal of ‘The Widow of Windsor’ has come to dominate most discourse about her.
In this piece, we’ll take a closer look at mourning etiquette in the Victorian era: The expected dress codes, the fabrics in use, and how long people were expected to wear specific styles depending on their relationship to the deceased, with a particular focus on how these themes unfold through the character of Dorothea in George Eliot’s Middlemarch.
As is often the case, life and literature mirrored one another. Writers of the time wove contemporary customs into their storytelling, using clothing as a powerful narrative device to express the internal state of a character in an external way.
A compelling example of this can be found in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, through the character of Dorothea Casaubon (née Brooke). While Eliot doesn’t offer exhaustive detail about the texture or construction of Dorothea’s mourning garments beyond the fact that they are black, there is still rich ground for interpretation, especially when her attire is set against that of her sister Celia. In this contrast, Eliot invites readers to consider how the physical discomfort of mourning dress, such as its weight, rigidity, and fabric, can reflect a deeper emotional burden. At the same time, the subtle differences between Dorothea’s and Celia’s sartorial descriptions gesture toward the Victorian expectations surrounding gender and a woman’s role in society, particularly in relation to marriage, motherhood, and widowhood.
Eliot draws a clear juxtaposition between Celia, the wife and mother, and Dorothea, the young widow. One could even argue that, given Dorothea’s childless marriage and her relatively young age, she begins to resemble the figure of the spinster — an identity fraught with its own social implications in the Victorian imagination.
The Etiquette of a Culture Draped in Black
Before we can dive into our case study on Dorothea, I want to briefly go over the significance of death and mourning practices in the Victorian period. This will help contextualise the analysis and draw richer conclusions about Dorothea as a widow in Middlemarch.
Death, in the Victorian era, was all around, lurking behind every corner, and people were very aware of it. (Child) Mortality rates were high, and childbirth remained one of the leading causes of death for women. Cholera and other infectious diseases ravaged communities, keeping the spectre of death ever-present. Meanwhile, growing literacy and the dawn of sensation journalism further fuelled the cultural fixation with death. Newspapers published vivid and often gruesome accounts of tragedy: Whether it was the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s or railway accidents, no detail was spared. Death, in Victorian Britain, was not a private matter, it was public, discussed, narrated, and scrutinised.
Naturally, grieving went hand in hand with death — its outward expression became a regular social occurrence that had to be regulated. Like so many other Victorian customs, mourning was deeply tied to social appearance and expectations. One’s outward expression of grief, particularly through dress, had to adhere to established rules. Mourning dress, the custom of wearing black after the death of a loved one, served as a visible and codified signal of loss:
“Black [was worn as an expression of] the privation of light and joy, the midnight gloom of sorrow for the loss sustained.”
— J. Morley, Death, Heaven and the Victorians (1971)
Failure to adhere to these codes could cast suspicion on the mourner’s sincerity. They risked appearing cold-hearted or inappropriate to the community they belonged to. For those who could afford mourning attire, a more rigid performance of grief was expected. This is echoed in Middlemarch, when Celia urges Dorothea to remove her widow’s cap, but Lady Chettam disapprovingly reminds her that “a widow must wear her mourning at least a year.”
Widow’s weeds and the weight of expectation
Depending on the mourner’s relationship to the deceased, specific rules dictated exactly what one was to wear, and for how long. These complex codes were explained in household manuals and etiquette columns, typically published in women’s magazines, offering guidance on how to mourn ‘properly’.
A widow, for example, was expected to remain in full, deep mourning for at least one to two years, followed by six months of half mourning, during which she was permitted to wear softer tones such as grey or lavender. No other family member faced such stringent obligations. While women in general were positioned as the ‘primary mourners’ the widow stood at the pinnacle of this social hierarchy. As in many aspects of life (then and now), the burden of emotional and social performance fell disproportionately on women.
Mourning culture was thus not just gendered, but crafted for women. Women were both the primary participants and the enforcers of mourning rituals, expected to lead by example and ensure their family’s adherence to propriety. As such, fashion publications began targeting this demographic, advertising seasonal mourning fashions and transforming grief into what Miun Sara Gleeson calls an “unapologetically […] fashionable affair”. Mourning became a consumer ritual. Wearing black became entangled with materialism, status, and performative piety, or a “bonanza of commercial exploitation” (D. Cannadine, 1981).
The superstition that it was bad luck to store mourning-dress in your house to take it out again the next time it was needed further fuelled the commercialisation of death and its accompanying rituals. Warehouses that manufactured and sold mourning-dress also handed out etiquette guides and manuals, ensuring that their customers would return to buy the garments that were made out to be essential for proper mourning in those manuals — a rather brilliant marketing technique. These businesses had to walk the tightrope of standing out in a saturated market while maintaining a tone of reverent decorum. Still, some major players, such as Courtaulds’ — which monopolised the manufacture of crape from the 1820s onward — tiptoed close to outright exploitation.
That said, this commoditisation of death is not entirely surprising in a period defined by industry and consumerism. By the 1880s, however, public sentiment began to shift and people began to be repulsed by the excesses of mourning culture and began to call for reform.
But let’s return to the widow, the most visibly and heavily policed figure in the mourning hierarchy. While she was cloaked in heavy crape and expected to avoid all social engagements, her male counterpart the widower had far fewer restrictions. A black or dark suit, black gloves, a somber necktie, and ‘deep weed’ on the hat were sufficient (“weed” derives from the Old English term “waed,” which translates to “garment”, or simply “clothes” in contemporary English). He was free to return to public life almost immediately, unburdened by the performative demands of seclusion.
Children, too, had guidelines: They were to wear mourning dress for a parent for one year. A cousin’s death, by contrast, warranted just a month of mourning. Hard to imagine anyone today checking their calendar to see if they’ve appropriately mourned their second cousin for a full thirty days, but to the Victorians, this mattered greatly. The importance of proper mourning attire is evident not just in etiquette manuals but in how the press discussed public figures. In January 1864, the Newcastle Journal reported:
“The Queen is still in mourning, and wears her widow’s weeds, though the Princesses are all out of mourning”.
The tone of the article hints at subtle criticism. Queen Victoria, who wore black for the rest of her life after Prince Albert’s death, also largely retreated from public life. Her prolonged seclusion and apparent refusal to ‘move on’ sparked backlash. Some viewed her behaviour as flouting the social contract, using grief as a pretext to avoid her duties as monarch. Her popularity plummeted as a result.
Ultimately, rituals around death and mourning were intended to help the bereaved process loss. Whether mourning dress fulfilled that role remains debatable. While etiquette manuals are plentiful, personal testimonies are scarce. Some scholars argue that mourning dress did little to soothe grief, serving instead as a tool for social signalling — a way to mark oneself as virtuous and deserving of sympathy. In that sense, wearing black was often less about emotion, and more about appearance.
When Cloth Becomes Character: Dorothea and the Materiality of Mourning
In Book Six of Middlemarch, published in 1872 but set between 1829 and 1832, George Eliot positions the sisters Dorothea and Celia as symbolic opposites: The widow and the wife. At first glance, the contrast is subtle, almost imperceptible. But if we read between the lines, the weight of Dorothea’s mourning attire begins to surface with striking clarity. Eliot doesn’t need to spell it out; the garments speak through Dorothea’s shifting demeanour.
Middlemarch book cover. Source: Penguin Classics
While Eliot offers little in the way of detailed fabric descriptions, it’s still worth pausing to consider what kind of cloth the Victorians would likely have used for mourning garments. By exploring the material culture of grief, we can start to bridge the gap between fashion history and fictional feeling. The heaviness of crape, the dullness of bombazine, and the suffocating silhouette of full mourning weren’t just visual cues; they were physical burdens. When mapped onto Dorothea’s behaviour, these garments take on symbolic weight, reinforcing the emotional toll of grief as something felt not just emotionally, but somatically — a mourning so intense, it drapes itself across the body.
Mourning in focus: A study through daguerreotypes
Contemporary daguerreotypes of women in mourning, whether widows or grieving mothers, reveal a shared visual language of restraint. The daguerreotypes below show garments defined by their simplicity: Plain bodices, devoid of embroidery, lace, or decorative trim. Mourning, in these images, is not just an emotional state but a visual code, rigorously enforced through fabric and silhouette.
Left: Unknown photographer. Mrs. Rev. W. S. (Mary Hodge) Blackstock (1859). Right: Unknown photographer. Mrs. Henry (Mary Eliza) (1850). Source: Archives of Ontario.
In the left image, the only discernible adornment is a line of buttons running down the bodice, likely covered in the same dull, black fabric as the dress itself, or made of jet, and thus visually unobtrusive. In the image on the right, the bodice is pleated, but otherwise unembellished: no jewelry, no lace, or other ornament. The monochrome palette dominates, interrupted only by a white collar (image on the left) and a widow’s cap (image on the right).
The white collar, worn by the grieving mother in the image on the right, was considered acceptable when mourning the loss of a child, whereas the widow’s black collar reflects the stricter expectations imposed on women mourning a spouse. The mother also wears black velvet ribbons on her sleeves — another small but telling detail. Even in these two examples, the distinctions are striking. Different losses came with different dress codes, and for widows, the rules were especially uncompromising.
Fabrics of sorrow
Victorian mourning attire adhered to a strict textile hierarchy. Crape, a silk treated to eliminate its natural sheen, was one of the most commonly used fabrics. Its matte, lifeless appearance embodied the somber tone required by mourning etiquette. Alongside crape, wool blends and bombazine (a silk fabric similarly dulled and often mixed with wool, cotton, or barege) were also widely used. Fabrics like velvet, satin, and lustrous silk were deliberately avoided due to their connotations of luxury and frivolity.
Jewellery was strictly off-limits during full mourning. However, in the later stage of half-mourning, women could begin reintroducing accessories, most notably Whitby jet jewellery: A glossy black material made from fossilised Araucaria trees or coal. From the 1860s through to the end of the 19th-century, jet became the signature adornment for women navigating the transition between grief and re-entry into society.
Selection of jet jewellery pieces. Source: artofmourning.com
Returning to the daguerreotypes discussed earlier, the widow’s black collar confirms she remains in full mourning. Her white linen cap, tightly secured under her chin and gently frilled at the cheeks, speaks to another layer of mourning convention. These garments — with slight adjustments — are likely similar to what Dorothea would have worn in Middlemarch.
First-hand accounts of mourning dress bring further clarity to its physical and emotional burden. In Death in the Victorian Family, Patricia Jalland draws from letters exchanged among the Horsley family. In one striking example, a daughter confesses she “can only bear to wear the hot paramatta and crape until the funeral tea,” insisting she could “endure it no longer and [had to] change into a cooler […] black costume.” Across their correspondence, mourning attire is consistently described by the Horsley women as uncomfortable and stifling — both socially and physically.
A costume of constraint: the fictional and physical weight of mourning
These first-hand accounts of mourning attire don’t just document a set of customs, but reveal how profoundly the garments weighed on the wearer, both physically and emotionally. Tight fits, layered fabrics, and stiff textures created a uniform that was as much about restriction as it was about respect.
This theme carries over into literature, notably in Middlemarch. The contrast between Dorothea and her sister Celia serves as a visual and emotional metaphor for the oppressive nature of mourning dress. Celia appears “all in white and lavender like a bunch of mixed violets,” a figure of airiness and softness. Dorothea, in stark contrast, sits beside her “in her widow’s dress, with an expression […] much too sad.” Wrapped in heavy black fabric from shoulder to shoe and wearing a tightly fastened cap, she is described with the weight of grief — both literal and symbolic — pressing down upon her.
Even in her own light muslin dress, Celia struggles with the heat and her sympathy grows at the thought of Dorothea enduring layers of crape and wool. She urges her sister to “throw off that cap. I am sure your dress must make you feel ill,” even going so far as to liken the mourning dress code to “slavery.” While this comparison is deeply inappropriate, it does underscore how strongly the characters feel.
Take parramatta, for example — a rough-textured fabric originally produced in Australia for convict uniforms. Though the version used in middle-class mourning attire would have been more refined, the association is telling. In deep mourning, this base layer of parramatta would have been entirely covered in crape, leaving little room for movement or breathability. Only during the transition into second mourning could these layers be slightly adjusted or gathered in decorative tucks.
The discomfort didn’t stop at the fabric. Mourning dress was defined by constriction: Fitted sleeves clung to the wrists, and mourning caps were secured tightly beneath the chin. These cumulative details not only highlight the discomfort of the widow’s attire, but also how the body itself became a canvas upon which grief — and societal expectation — was displayed.
One particularly intriguing detail is the resemblance between the widow’s cap and the headwear traditionally worn by older women in the same era. This overlap extends beyond accessories. In fact, many widow’s garments echoed styles typically associated with old age. It raises a compelling question: Were widows, regardless of their actual age, being dressed in a way that symbolically aligned them with the elderly? And if so, what does that say about how Victorian society viewed widowhood — as a kind of premature aging or social withdrawal?
A Descent or a Rebirth? Widowhood and the Female Plotline
In the nineteenth century, a woman’s social identity was inextricably tied to her relationships with men as daughters, wives, mothers, or sisters. When those connections were severed, particularly through widowhood, her status could shift dramatically. In Dorothea’s case, the death of her husband leaves her childless and adrift, and she figuratively steps down from the idealised trajectory captured in The Life and Age of Woman: Stages of Woman’s Life from the Cradle to the Grave.
Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives: The Life and Age of Woman: Stages of
Woman’s Life from the Cradle to the Grave (1850). Source: Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis.
Without a husband or children, Dorothea is no longer situated at the social pinnacle expected of a wife and mother. Instead, she reverts to a status closer to that of a single woman — even, arguably, a spinster. This shift is subtly reinforced by the way her sister Celia treats her. At this point in her life, Celia occupies the fifth “step” of the painting: She is a wife, a mother, and securely embedded within the societal ideal. Dorothea, in contrast, moves into Celia’s household not as a guest of equal footing but more as a companion — someone there to support the new mother, help care for the baby, and exist on the periphery of a family structure to which she no longer belongs. While her stay aligns with expectations of a widow’s temporary seclusion, it also mirrors the common trope of the unmarried aunt: Useful, quiet, and secondary.
Garrett Stewart writes in A Valediction For Bidding Mourning: Death and the Narratee in Brontë’s Villette that “death stands as the […] inherent end of representation,” functioning as a narrative closure. In Victorian fiction, this tendency is particularly strong: Death often marks the end of a protagonist’s story arc. In Middlemarch, Dorothea may not vanish from the narrative after Mr. Casaubon’s death, but there is a noticeable tonal shift. Her storyline quiets, her character seems paused, almost as though one version of her has ended, and another is yet to emerge.
But what makes Dorothea so compelling is precisely this transformation. Rather than remaining in the liminal space widowhood initially thrusts her into, she begins to reclaim agency. Mr. Casaubon’s death marks a turning point. It is not an ending to her story, but a second beginning:
“Dorothea would not long remain passive where action had been assigned to her, […] and her mind, as soon as she was clearly conscious of her position, was silently occupied with what she ought to do as the owner of Lowick Manor with the patronage of the living attached to it.”
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
Beneath the widow’s cap
Let’s take a closer look at the widow’s cap — a small but potent detail of Victorian mourning attire. Worn inside the house, and covered by a black bonnet when stepping outdoors, the cap completed the visual code of widowhood. But beyond its functional purpose, it often carried symbolic weight, especially in literature.
In Middlemarch, the widow’s cap becomes a subtle yet powerful emblem of Dorothea’s narrative transition. Much like the stiff, uncomfortable mourning fabrics typical of the period, the cap represents both duty and constraint — something to be borne with dignity, but also something to be eventually cast off. This duality appears not only in Middlemarch, but also in works like Charlotte Yonge’s Magnum Bonum, where the widow’s cap is treated with more overt disdain.
Charlotte M. Yonge by George Richmond (1844). Source: National Portrait Gallery, London.
While Dorothea observes the mourning code with solemn propriety, Caroline — the widow in Magnum Bonum — is vocal about her dislike of her “wretched cap.” She frequently forgets to wear it, only to be scolded by her sister-in-law. Interestingly, the dynamics are reversed in Middlemarch: It’s Dorothea who clings to the rituals of grief, and her sister Celia who encourages her to loosen up — quite literally. Celia implores her to “throw off that cap,” claiming that surely, it “must make [her] ill.”
Though Eliot offers little sartorial detail regarding Dorothea’s overall dress, the widow’s cap receives special narrative attention. It becomes the focal point of her transformation. When Celia finally succeeds in removing it, the gesture is described in these terms:
“It was a pretty picture to see this little lady in white muslin unfastening the widow’s cap from her more majestic sister, and tossing it on to a chair [… and] the coils and braids of dark-brown hair had been set free.”
— George Eliot, Middlemarch
The unfastening of the cap is the unfastening of grief, of social rigidity, and of Dorothea’s former self. Her hair — a symbol of femininity and vitality — is released, and so is she. Celia recognises this transformation, affirming, “Dodo, taking your cap off made you like yourself again in more ways than one.”
This moment marks more than a return to visibility or vitality — it signals a shift in Dorothea’s status. She is no longer merely the bowed widow or the sidelined spinster. She emerges as the wealthy, independent widow: a figure both admired and, at times, feared within Victorian society. The cap’s removal, then, is not just a sartorial decision, it is a declaration of autonomy.
Dorothea is set free at last and Celia acknowledges that the removal of the cap has changed her sister for the better. This marks Dorothea’s return to society as more than just the slightly bowed widow, or the spinster; she becomes the rich and independent widow.
The Gendering of Mourning: Widowhood and Female Autonomy
Given the symbolic role of the widow in family grief and public mourning rituals, widowhood became a distinct category of Victorian womanhood — one that intertwined femininity with death. Scholars have long traced this connection between women and death across various aspects of Victorian life, from the haunting beauty ideals of ‘consumptive chic’ to the tragic frequency of death in childbirth, which kept women in constant proximity to mortality.
Women’s mourning dress codes were heavily policed, making grief not only public, but profoundly gendered. Paradoxically, widowhood in Victorian society offered women a dual-edged status. On one hand, it could grant newfound independence, especially legal and financial autonomy. On the other, it diminished their social value by removing the identity conferred by marriage. In Dorothea’s case, she is neither wife nor mother, and therefore situated in a social vacuum that others try to define and control.
The regulations around mourning attire reflected broader attitudes toward women’s place in society. The rules for widows were particularly rigid: One year of deep mourning followed by another year of gradual easing. These stages of dress and behavior implied that a woman’s identity was still tethered to the men in her life: First through her father, then her husband. Upon marriage, her legal and symbolic self was absorbed into his. Widowhood, by contrast, marked a return to visibility — a kind of legal resurrection. She could now act in her own name, had perhaps come to inherit her own property, and make decisions independently. But with this re-emergence came scrutiny.
This helps explain why widows were so stringently regulated; they disrupted the gender formula. Young, wealthy, and independent widows were perceived as dangerous anomalies. Literature of the period often casts them as unsettling figures. The mourning code with its black crape, veils, and caps was meant to keep them visually and socially bound, signaling their supposed withdrawal from the marriage market. Yet these very garments could have the opposite effect.
In Middlemarch, mourning attire becomes not just a symbol of grief, but of unexpected allure. Dorothea is described at one point to “look handsomer than ever in her mourning”. The widow’s weeds, intended to shroud and suppress, instead heighten her visibility. They draw attention to her beauty, her independence, and the power she now holds, particularly the power to choose her future path.
Ultimately, mourning dress becomes a tool of both repression and resistance. It attempts to extend the coverture of marriage by keeping women veiled, covered, and symbolically attached to their husbands, but in doing so, it also reveals the shifting balance of power. In Middlemarch, Dorothea is surrounded by men (uncles, brother-in-law) all trying to guide, contain, or redirect her. But the more they attempt to manage her grief and her garments, the more evident her autonomy becomes.
Final Reflections
George Eliot’s Middlemarch, when examined through the lens of sartorial symbolism, reveals just how deeply intertwined Victorian literature is with the material realities of mourning dress. The fabrics themselves (crape, bombazine, and other heavy textiles) serve not only as garments but as tactile manifestations of grief. Much like sorrow itself, these materials physically weigh the wearer down, encasing them in a visible burden of loss.
Mourning attire, particularly that worn by widows, illustrates the gendered nature of bereavement. In Victorian society, widows faced far stricter expectations than widowers, both in duration and intensity of mourning. The rituals surrounding widowhood — prescribed clothing, prolonged periods of seclusion, and codes of conduct — reflected broader cultural anxieties around female independence. In many ways, mourning dress functioned as a tool of re-coverture: Once married, a woman’s identity was subsumed into that of her husband, and in widowhood, she was once again subject to social control, despite the legal autonomy his absence afforded her.
Dorothea stands as a symbol of this tension. As a young and financially independent widow, she embodies a figure that both disrupts and fascinates the Victorian imagination. Her mourning garb marks her publicly as off the marriage market, yet paradoxically enhances her allure. In this way, widow’s weeds communicate not only grief but also possibility: Independence, choice, and potential remarriage. The garments that were meant to conceal and control, can at least in the context of Middlemarch, reveal and empower.
Ultimately, mourning attire performs a double function in its physicality:
- First, it enacts the heaviness of grief and the restricted autonomy imposed by mourning codes.
- Second, it cloaks the woman in figurative re-coverture, while simultaneously opening a space for redefinition and reclamation of self.
In Middlemarch, mourning garments conceal as much as they reveal about loss, about gender, and about the woman beneath.
Select Sources
- Dagni Bredesen, An Emblem of All the Rest Wearing the Widow’s Cap in Victorian Literature (2014).
- Sarah Webster Goodwin & Elisabeth Bronfen, Death and Representation (1993).
- M. Elaine MacKay, Through the Lens of Fashion: Daguerreotypes, Dress, and the Women of Canada West (2016).
- Rebecca N. Mitchell, Death Becomes Her: On the Progressive Potential of Victorian Mourning (2013).
- Mary E. Nash, Good Manners: A Guide to Good Behaviour (1886).
- Leigh Summers, Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Corset (2001).
- Lou Taylor, Mourning Dress: A Costume and Social History (2009).
- April Madden, The Victorian Cult of Death (2017).
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